Malthus, Thomas (1766–1834)

THOMAS MALTHUS was an English economist and demographer who theorized that population growth tends to exceed food supplies. Thus the improvement of living conditions of humankind is impossible without a strict policy of birth control. Malthus's economic theory is pessimistic at its core, as it describes poverty as inescapable for humankind. His controversial ideas contributed to his fame and he is considered a key figure in the development of classic economic thought. John Maynard Keynes explicitly recognized Malthus as a forerunner of modern economic thought. Yet his ideas have also been indicted as having had a strategic role in defending capitalist political economy against more inclusive and democratic movements.

Malthus was born into a wealthy liberal family and was largely educated at home until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784. He earned his master's in 1791 and became a professor of political economy at the East India Company's college at Haileybury, Hertfordshire, in 1805. Malthus lived there for the rest of his life and was elected to prestigious bodies such as the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, and the Royal Academy of Berlin.

The American and French Revolutions characterized Malthus's formative years. The young Malthus grew up in the cultural context of the Enlightenment and his father acquainted him with the ideas of leading intellectuals of the period such as David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Yet in his own economic thought, Malthus was to depart from the Enlightenment principles of liberty and happiness.

In 1798, Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society,” which received wide public attention and established his fame. The essay clearly reflects his economic pessimism, as the hopes for social improvement and the betterment of human living conditions are dismissed as vain. Malthus defines the growth of the population as geometric while the progression of the means of subsistence is at best only arithmetic.

While the Enlightenment promoted the perfectibility of society, Malthus did not believe that social imbalances were the result of evil institutions. To Malthus, misery and poverty were not the direct outcome of unfair institutions, but of the fertility of humankind. This definition of poverty as a simple imbalance between population and the means of subsistence was a clear reaction against the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, [Page 679]and its supporters. A particular target of Malthus was the English radical philosopher William Godwin, who had theorized that the future held the promise of a full development of man's rationality. Thus, people would live without the need for laws and institutions. Looking at the realities of his times with the empiricist gaze of a would-be sociologist, Malthus saw no evidence for Godwin's optimism.

Malthus's theory of population growth became part of classical economics and the starting point for discussions of demographic problems. Because of its pessimism, Malthus's theory gave economics the label of “dismal science.” It also influenced Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution as a struggle for resources. Darwin applied Malthus's concepts to the natural world.

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